Letter from Brazil: The scandal that is spreading like an oil slick

Rather like an oil slick, and potentially as toxic for Petrobras, is the menacing spread of lawsuits against the company in US courts

By

David Smith

March 9, 2015 Updated: March 6, 2015 9:59 p.m. GMT

The company is known these days to almost every Brazilian as the petrolao, literally the “big oily”.

Yet the state giant Petrobras, for so long Latin America's largest corporation, threatens to drive the world's seventh-biggest economy back into recession, and to embroil any number of multinationals in a scandal that reads like a thriller, with whistle-blowers claiming that there have been massive bribes and politicians have been on...